The company's stock, which has not traded above $3.50 in more
than a year, barely budged in after-hours trading.

No matter how you slice it, Zynga has fallen out of favor
with Wall Street.

But CEO and co-founder Mark
Pincus, who returned to the top job at Zynga earlier this year,
says that the company is primed for a turnaround.

"We're making deep investments
both on new IP and backend technologies," Pincus told Business
Insider in an interview on Tuesday.

This comes less than a day after the bombshell news dropped that
game publisher Activision Blizzard would be buying King Digital,
the developer of the Candy Crush Saga mobile
game phenomenon, in a
$5.9 billion deal — more than two times Zynga's market
cap.

Pincus, incidentally, says that acquisition "makes a ton of sense
for Activision," giving it access to key demographics.

New investments

Basically, Pincus says that while the popular perception of Zynga
is as a "marginally profitable or unprofitable company,"
depending on the quarter, it's investing in the future.

Instead, he wants Zynga to focus only on the genres it's
good at. For instance, the social Scrabble clone Words With
Friends is still leading its category, and Zynga has successful
poker and
slot machine apps, too.

Zynga is also still committed to the idea of social gaming, with
the vision that it could be a new "social medium" in and of
itself, Pincus says.

While competitors like Hipster Whale, the creator of the popular
"Crossy Road" game, only make a handful of titles that are all in
the same vein, Pincus says that Zynga's broader focus gives it
more mass-market appeal.

But there are bumps on the road ahead: In January of 2014, Zynga
bought NaturalMotion, the developer behind hits like "Clumsy
Ninja," as the company invests in more action and
adventure-oriented games.

That investment hasn't yet paid off, but Pincus says that it's
just a matter of time and focus. And in the short term, Pincus
acknowledges that it's hard to see it that way from the
outside.

"It makes it a harder strategy to show when you're a public
company," Pincus says.